I want it for listening to a channel of speech, not music. I will admit it's great for music.

It astounds me that despite all of the underlying technologies supporting that ability... Even if they've rewritten their own mp3 decoder, it seems unlikely that it's not just disabled by a config value in a file.

If it's something you have control over, you can set the sample rate higher and even lower the bit rate to save on bandwidth. I provide an online stream of my local NOAA Weather Radio station and I encode at Mono 22 KHz and 24 Kbps MP3 and it sounds great. And I can listen to it through Sonos even (not that I do very often, but on occasion).